Too many people try too hard to get people to whip out their credit card and purchase online. Unless you are a huge brand name online, the highest conversion you can expect (the amount of sales you get divided by your total number of visits) is about 2%. I hardly see more than a true 2% conversion rate when you ask for a credit card.

Now, when it comes to gathering data (an online lead) you can get as high as 15%. If you are a good sales person, you should be able to close half of your warm leads. If you closed half, your overall conversion would be 7.5%. This is about 4 more sales that you would have if you would have relied only on your website to close the deal down.

Imagine what you would have to do to get your website to close 400% more sales. You would most likely need to do 4x the amount of marketing. What would you rather have?